Hey now, some of them reach -50% profit margins!

It is a form of temporary insanity, I suppose (though self-induced).

Silicon Valley was practically built by the military industrial complex.

True. 'The Secret History of Silicon Valley', Steve Blank, is essential viewing, IMO.

Which was written as a call to action. The Valley should remember how trade is kept free, especially all those electronics moving Eastward across the Pacific. Worth reading Mahan if you're confused.

hoisted by its own petard!

heh upvoted, came here to note same; the continuous net gain of defense R&D

I start with section headers, then subheadings, then fill in the details.

See also: Eulerian Video Magnification (EVM) to amplify subtle motions and colour changes:

https://youtu.be/ONZcjs1Pjmk https://youtu.be/_qtzWNZApsw

Always wanted to implement that on a phone, it would be like a superpower!

Visual Rust sounds like a defect but I'm looking forward to it.

Funnily enough the metre is defined by the globe as well: the arc from the equator to North pole is defined as 10,000 km. I think this might be where the alternative angle metrics came from, which went with the metre:

full circle is 400 grad, so a right angle (10,000 km) is 100 grad.

Then minutes and seconds are factors of 100, so a centesimal minute is 1 km and 1 centesimal second is 10 m.

Originally it was defined like that, but it was fairly quickly redefined as the distance between marks on a prototype platinum bar. It's had a couple of other definitions since then, but it's currently defined "by taking the fixed numerical value of the speed of light in vacuum c to be 299 792 458 when expressed in the unit ms⁻¹, where the second is defined in terms of the caesium frequency ΔνCs".

https://www.bipm.org/en/si-base-units/metre

Yes technically speaking there is a different physical reference now but that's where it came from. A bit like how 1 ft is now 304.8mm but that's because it's the size of a human foot (with some historic details no doubt).

Etymology vs dictionary, I suppose.

But that isn't a change to the definition of the meter. What do you think the motivation for the constant 299,792,458 is?

> that isn't a change to the definition of the meter

How is it not? it's not a change to the actual distance (well, it is for a sufficient precision), but a change to the definition of the metre is exactly what it is. It's defined relative to the speed of light rather than a random platinum bar length, with the constant picked so that the actual measurement stay the same (up to a certain level of precision).

On the other hand think of the wavelength of light and how absurdly fast the oscillation frequency is to provide a wavelength of a few hundred nm at the speed of light. 8 minutes is a lot of cycles, and 150M km is a lot of wavelengths!

Cars also seem to get bigger with each iteration. Then the introduce new smaller models that are the same size as the earlier model..

Yes that's giving me a bit of pause. I wonder what, say, Apple's ToS has for this kind of functionality.

Apple (and Google, and most others) process wake words on device. Imagine the technical complexity and expense of a billion devices streaming audio that is like 0.01% wake words.